Midweek briefing

Index nips now, chomps later

A fireplug of a fellow, Tracy Pyles is accustomed to playing the part of a yapping hound on a tight leash. Having ignored his barks about a bureaucratic bedevilment known as the composite index, Augusta County supervisors now are feeling the bite of the thing at their backsides, and so the people’s.

Somewhere in the smoky mist of his mostly lonely and entirely futile campaign against a massive property reassessment earlier this year, Pyles admonished his colleagues on the supervisors board that heightened values now would cost the county state money later. How? State aid for schools is based on the composite index, which is based on property values, the aim of it all being to ensure that poorer districts get a larger state share. Wealth being defined by property, increased values frequently translate to a smaller helping of state money.

This is one of the reasons Pyles contended, and we agreed with him, that the supervisors ought not assume that simply lowering tax rates would solve the problem of a reassessment that drove up values by roughly a fourth at a time when elsewhere appraisals were plunging. In fact, to Pyles’ particular point, leveling tax revenues by lowering the rate – a move we are almost always inclined to support – opens deeper fiscal wounds when values have soared and the economy is stalled: it means not equal money but less.

Already, Augusta is losing $750,000 in state education aid next year under recently released composite index recalculations. Almost three-fourths of the state’s 134 districts – including Waynesboro and Staunton – face similar predicaments.

But for Augusta, the trouble runs deeper. This year’s reassessment has not yet been factored into the composite index. That won’t happen for another two years. When it does, Pyles contends, Augusta will lose millions of dollars with increased values here being compounded by drops as steep as 19 percent in places such as Fairfax County.

Pyles is a human rub racing in a direction counter to the crowds, and so his colleagues pay him the same regard they do radio static. This does him an unkindness he perhaps invites, but it does taxpayers a disservice they do not deserve. A monstrously high reassessment stalks the county now and later will seize it in a fiscal stranglehold. Pyles rang the warning bell and county taxpayers responded with shouts of alarm, but five of the other six supervisors plugged their ears to the din. They insist otherwise, but appearances suggest they heard and heeded only the clamor of a petty personality clash.

Taking lumps with their tea

Riled conservatives in Danville planned to tea party like it’s 1773, burning in effigy the Pernicious P’s, Fifth District Rep. Tom Perriello and the leader with whom he is taken, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A national backlash doused the idea. We’re sympathetic to tea-partiers' angst, and to their distaste for Pelosi and Perriello. But we don’t care for the symbolism. Dispose of the pair properly, at the ballot box.